call
him, but I am more respectful. My gracious, though! isn't it sweltering?
I'm nearly baked, you make me walk so fast!' and he wiped the great
drops of swat from his forehead.

'Why don't you go back then? Why are you walking here in the hot sun?'
Jerrie asked.

'I am going home with you,' he replied. 'Do you think I'd let you go
alone?'

'Go alone?' Jerrie repeated, stopping short and fixing her blue eyes
upon him. 'You have let me go alone a hundred times, and after dark,
too, when I was much smaller than I am now, and less able to defend
myself, supposing there was anything to fear, which there is not. Pray
go back, and not trouble yourself for me.'

'I shall not go back,' Tom said. 'I waited on purpose to come with you.
There is something I must say to you, and I may as well say it now as
any other time.'

Jerrie was tall, but Tom was six inches taller, and he was looking down
straight into her eyes with an expression in his before which hers fell,
for she guessed what it was he wished to say to her, and her heart beat
painfully as, without another word, she walked rapidly on until they
were in the woods near a place where four tall pines formed a kind of
oblong square. Here an iron seat had been placed years before, when the
Tracy children were young, and held what they called their picnics there
under the thick boughs of the pines which shaded them from both heat and
cold. Laying his hand on Jerrie's shoulder, Tom said to her:

'Sit here with me under the pines while I tell you what for a long time
I have wanted to tell you, and which may as well be told at once.'

Still Jerrie did not speak, but she sat down upon the seat, and, taking
off her hat, began to fan herself with it, while with the end of her
parasol she tried to trace letters in the thick carpet of dead pine
needles at her feet.

Her attitude was not encouraging, and a less conceited man than Tom
would have felt disheartened, but he was not. No girl would be insane
enough to refuse Tom Tracy, of Tracy Park; and at last he made the
plunge, and told her of his love for her and his desire to make her his
wife.

'I know I was a mean little scamp when I was a boy,' he said, 'and did a
lot of things for which I am ashamed; but I believe that I always loved
you, Jerrie, even when I was teasing you the worst. I know I used to
think you the prettiest little girl I ever saw, and now I think you the
prettiest big one, and I have had splendid opport